


Iced

by 35grams (caxxe)



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Clairvoyance, M/M, Space Flight, Unreliable Narrator, time travel via cryosleep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-28
Updated: 2019-03-28
Packaged: 2019-12-25 15:02:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18263750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/caxxe/pseuds/35grams
Summary: "Would you?"Levi runs."Would you see it with me?"Levi runs.





	Iced

 

Levi wakes first from immortality. The last shift usually leaves the ship a mess, so he doesn't wait for his shift partner to rouse from cryo before doing a quick sweep of their quarters and the standard inventory check. He leaves the wellness questionnaire for later. Vomiting? Disorientation? Not for years. 

He maneuvers to the engine room in zero-G - switched off between shifts to conserve energy - to perform stress tests and search for irregularities or leaks. While he's at it, he hears movement in the bio lab. His partner must be checking on the microorganisms they'd been chartered to collect from an interstellar planemo. Straight to work, this guy. Maybe this will be one of the more bearable flights.   

Levi can't muster a passing interest in their odyssey to collect some heinously rare organisms from some nearly barren rock in the middle of Fuck All, Nowhere, but the pay is good and the time it takes to zip there and back in deep sleep would take care of a few persistent debt collectors making calls to dead phones and visits to empty flats.  

It was their turn to wake from cryosleep and maintain the ship. The crew of twenty sleeps in cycles and wakes in pairs to assume watch with one to five years in between shifts to conserve energy and rations. A week-long trip to them is two to five years on Earth. This one had been slated for thirty, but as Levi checks their logs, he is treated to the surprise that they are pushing sixty. 

He winces. An uncharted asteroid field, an engine malfunction. It doesn't matter why. In their case, missing a crucial orbital window to slingshot the ship using the gravitational well of a passing gas giant. He knows at least some of these fools expected the estimates to be set in stone and promised this or that to their families accordingly. There will be plenty of unintended visits to graves and hospitals when they touch down. 

The station footage shows as much. A junior engineer in stupors. A navigator clogging up ventilators with silent tears. This wasn't even his assigned shift, he finds. Their senior navigator had slotted him in early. Only he has clearance to modify the engine.

He could override company protocols and rig the ship to fly faster. The Company will be up his ass about engine wear, but it'll save a few tears. Maybe then, these juniors will focus enough to catch these vector irregularities Levi will have to spend a full day poring through to shave another few months off their trip.

There was movement in the corridor outside. The rustle of a Company-issued regulator suit. "Mister Ackerman?"

Levi moves to the navigator's station to correct their course. It wasn't his specialty, but he's learned a thing or two in his time. "Our germs have a nice breakfast?"

"Our...ah. They ----." 

Levi briefly met their rookie astrobiologist before their departure. He let him talk just long enough about his precious bacteria to gauge whether he'd be waking up with a man in his right mind. He'd been stuck on more than one flight with a partner who ended the mission in ropes and hysterics. This work wasn't for everyone. Many sign on out of spite. Misanthropy. Loneliness. Sleeping to a cure for whatever incurable thing ails them. Tens of thousands apply. Hundreds chosen. A few dozen make a second trip, and Levi knows the faces, fears and dreams of everyone who's made a third. 

Levi swats at some plastic floating by. "Grab some of this trash, yeah? Can't see past two meters." 

"Ah," Erwin says behind him, though the rustle of plastic and empty bottles tell him that he's getting to work. "That's why you haven't -------- on the gravity. Easier -- spot."

Levi's hands still once he parses the meaning in whatever words he still shares with a man technically many hundreds of years his junior. "Don't need that energy hog. This ain't a space hotel."

Erwin laughs easily. "Copy that."

When Levi is through correcting their course, he calls the young researcher back to the engine room. Erwin uses the handles on the walls and ceiling to steer his course. He moves like many first-timers do through the cramped rooms: as if the smallest careless jerk of his elbow would trip some wire and turn the ship into a fireball. Levi didn't hold it against this one. Big guy. 

"Put your mitt there," Levi points him to a console as he places his own hand on the screen. He does. Levi almost has to look twice at his suspiciously well-behaved mountain man. He could swear he was siphoning all the oxygen from the area with his mammoth lungs as he lingers to watch. After racking his recently defrosted brain for the right codes, Levi overrides Company control. 

"----------- wrong ---- ---- date, Mister Ackerman."

Levi finalizes the transfer of control and lifts restrictions on the engine room as Erwin squints at the arrival date on their console.

"It's-"

Levi moves into the engine room, quiets his shuddering hands, and has his way with the machine. He returns to the console in the adjacent room and recalculates. Forty-eight years. 

Levi sighs sharply. Any more stress on the engine core and they won't get anywhere at all. 

"You wanna send a message home, do it now," Levi says. He can normally predict what flavor of despair his shift partners prefer. This one, with his distant eyes and industriously robotic expression, is no puzzle.

"When you're done, reserve program 6NI in the STIM. Every 12 hours. I'll know if you don't."

Erwin nods. "Yes, sir."

Levi leaves the man to himself. This is the easy part. If they're lucky, the preprogrammed counselor will take care of the worst. This is his second ride since they invented these things, this one-stop answer to space madness. Simulated environments. Full sensory input. Maybe he'll watch a movie.

Erwin is recording his message in the barracks. It will reach Earth some ten to fifteen years before they do.

Levi is wrapping up his daily run on the weighted treadmill when Erwin surfaces.

"How -- you -- it?"

Levi twangs one of the straps tying him to the machine. "Clip these on and-"

"No-" Erwin searches for his words. "I meant- You don't even ---- surprised."

"Seniority perk. You see it all."

"Eighteen -----?"

Levi switches the setting to a brisk walk. Erwin should have woken up with another first timer to commiserate with. Levi cannot give him what he wants. "A blip."

"Your first flight. Five years, delayed five ----."

Levi looks up at him. His blonde hair is floating too whimsically for his twisted brow, his puffy eyes. He's not supposed to know this.

"And in ---- fourth," he pushes, "--- years became twenty - ----. ------ malfunction. ---"

Levi stops the treadmill and doesn't look at him when he pulls rank and orders him out. He knows he's overreacted as soon as he says it, as soon as Erwin silently leaves.

It takes effort to read his files. He was valuable enough to the Company for them to grant him this small vanity. Physicians and historians spend several days signing non disclosure agreements with teams of attorneys. 

The astrobiologist knows this much, so he must know more. There goes any hope of a clean, quiet flight. 

Levi is poring through engine diagnostics at the control room's console when Erwin finds him again and apologizes. Apparently, their assigned medical officer, a second-timer Levi has the misfortune of flying with again and who, regrettably, possesses everyone's medical records, ran their mouth during their and Erwin's last joint shift. Levi fights the urge to disconnect Hange's oxygen.

"I ---- assumed -- was ------ knowledge, the way they -------"

"It isn't," Levi says. "Get ready to sign a shit ton of paperwork when we land."

"Paperwork..."

Levi waves him off. "Whatever you call it now."

"-- ---- -- -------- it."

Levi ignores him.

Erwin eyes him curiously. "Can --- not understand ---------- - ---?"

"I pick it up in a week or two."

Erwin is the picture of bemusement. He taps his earpiece, where everything Levi says with his ancient tongue is translated into his perfect, contemporary form, and then points to Levi's own.

"Don't want it. Relied on it for one fifty and couldn't communicate my face from my ass when it fried on a field op."

"One fifty?"

Levi sets his jaw. "Century and a half."

Erwin's eyes glaze over with the same existential awe Levi had enough of several interplanetary wars and reconstructions ago. He becomes a walking museum to these people. Few get it through their thick skulls that he sleeps through every one of their revolutions and plagues and wars and couldn't have passed by their great aunt who maybe worked the cafe register once by the southwest lunar docks.  

Mercifully, Erwin asks nothing more.

"I--- return to --- germs," Erwin recalls with a smile. "I'm sorry again --- -- outburst. -- --- unprofessional."   

He needn't lie. Levi can see it in his face. Regret, maybe, but also relief. The man had wanted a reaction, any reaction, from Levi. Anything to not be the only one feeling a little crazy. Fine. Levi can give him that much.     

When Erwin goes, Levi catches him switching off his translator.  

That night - or the six to nine hours the Company insists they call night - Erwin wakes and twists against the straps securing him to his bunk. He tells Levi of a spectacular dream. Light curled and billowed like a living thing, streaking across his eyes and erupting into countless spectacular winding threads. Levi unstraps himself, floats to him, and taps on the regulator installed at Erwin's temple to thicken the AntiRad contacts in his eyes. Erwin winces at the discomfort. His startlingly blue eyes are veiled black. "Must ---- be so thick?"

"Depends. Could just keep soaking up the corpses of dead stars." 

Erwin licks his parched lips. He isn't drinking enough water. He gives Levi a secret, insolent little smile. "With a light show like that..."

"Fine. Enjoy your cooked retinas," Levi says, and watches Erwin notice the empty space at his temple where a regulator should be, notice inhuman, lab-grown grey before Levi turns away.

-

Erwin doesn't switch his translator back on, though it gives them no little trouble. Levi uses the oldest slang he knows just to fuck with him, but the well of patience in this guy is bottomless. He studiously cycles through film and tv from Levi's day in between his duties and boldly misuses every last thing he learns. It takes his mind off their delayed arrival, at least. Another few days without incident and Levi may even put away the loop of rope he'd secured to his belt as a precaution. 

-

"Don't know many first timers signing onto twenty year flights, let alone thirty," Levi says when he is sure the shock of the delay had dimmed. He's been hounded by his shift partner's intent. Tenure. Department chair. Undersecretary at the Global Pan-Oceanic Administration. Even if he hadn't skimmed his file, it was all anyone in their pre-flight briefings would whisper and coo about. 

Erwin looks up as he diligently stores away his research equipment. Expertly cleaned and buffed, little glass vials and dishes go into little plastic sleeves go into slightly larger sleeves that go into glass boxes which rest in metal containers tucked away into recesses in the walls. He and the other biologists on board are conducting trials and making the most of their elongated journey to study whatever it was that made these things worth the trip.

"We found microbial life -- Centauri and Bernard's, --- never on -- expelled planet," Erwin says. "Once the atmosphere's chemical comp gave it away, the Company ------ me." Erwin's hands slowed with their zipping and tying. "I studied marine extremophiles on Earth, and ---- the Centauri and Bernard samples. My teams ---- --- first to successfully ------- conditions in --- lab unique to ---- extraterrestrial organism."

Levi crosses his legs as momentum pulls him upside down. "Doesn't sound so hard."

Erwin laughs. "Would that -- could --- it in a humidifier and ---- it a day." His face falls into something pensive, even somber. "I can't believe -- did it. We're one ---- closer to being a true space-faring species. A ---- closer to the truth."

Levi struggles valiantly to keep his eyes from rolling into his skull at this first rate dreamer. "What truth?"

Erwin casts an eye to the black port-side window. "Why are we alone?"

-

Levi readjusts Erwin's portions. Either he was less than truthful about his diet at his physical or the ground medical team doesn't know metabolic readings from their asses, but he should be less lethargic now. Could even be he was one of the lucky few whose metabolism runs away from them in zero-G, or after the stress of being iced for half a decade at a time.

He finds out when he checks their work hours. For the sake of proper diagnosis and post-mission archival, they punch in and out, which is how Levi knows Erwin has been going over by six hours, once by ten. Levi lets him make his prettiest excuses before throwing out the lights in the bio lab at the proper end time until Erwin relents. In days, he is working smarter, faster. His eyes are brighter, his laughs louder. 

Making this or that adjustment for his shift partners is nothing new. The body is an engine. Like any other, it can be miscalibrated. It can be mistreated. It can fail.

He isn't used to engines smiling and touching his shoulder and trying to return the favor. Levi ignores his efforts until Erwin - on purpose, he suspects - tries to turn on a vintage screen in the rec room with his temple regulator. Levi introduces the concept of a remote and stays to get a kick out of when Erwin thinks the films they have on board were first shot. Each time he's off by a hundred years, he takes an hour of Levi's assigned shift at the gas and fluid recycling plant. 

Levi corrects the more egregiously sloppy films as he passes by. No, the nuclear winter wasn't that long. The lunar colonies were abandoned for ten years, not fifty. Terran Separatists claimed to colonize Pluto first, but the Ramirez expedition had already become self sufficient on the Silent Slopes. Kid's stuff, Erwin. 

Erwin talks him through his own era and Levi tries not to look too curious. He stays for a month between flights. A year, once, during one of the more catastrophic financial depressions, while the Company crawled back to its feet, and even then, he spent much of it on Phobos or in orbit. Erwin tells him how they eat, where they work, how they go to school, what they protest, who they idolize. 

Passing by becomes correcting becomes staying for a minute becomes movie night. Levi has never picked up a new era's idiosyncrasies from a shift partner this quickly, and Erwin picks up a fair amount of the old tongue that he insists on using. They develop a temporal pidgin no one in the universe speaks but them. He returns the rope to the supply cabin.

-

Sometime in the middle of one, Erwin said, "Mike would've loved this one."

"Friend?"

"Husband."

Levi is sure he misheard. He snorts. "Thought you said husband."

"I did."

Levi's eyes snap to his hand, but of course they wore their self-cleaning suits and gloves around the clock. Maybe there was nothing there anyway. "Smart, I guess, saving a dime on divorce attorneys."

Erwin turns to him and speaks cautiously, as if unsure what Levi is driving at. "No need. We're happy."

A Demeter astronaut wanders the wastes onscreen as Levi's mind does likewise trying to solve this enigma. "He on this flight?"

"No."

"Concurrent one?"

Erwin doesn't answer right away. His jaw works. "He lives on Earth. We had an understanding."

Levi's ears fill with cotton. His eyes are fixed on a single point on the screen but see nothing. After one insufferable, silent minute, he excuses himself and goes back to work. 

Erwin almost follows him. "We knew the risks-"

"None of my business." 

On his way, Levi grabs the length of rope from the supply cabin and clips it back onto his waist. 

No fucking wonder. Levi is impressed now at how well he handled the delay. A married man leaving his husband without any hope of communication, knowingly, for thirty years, now near fifty?

He can't focus on his diagnostics. His mind is flooded with bets with himself on how long until this fool loses his mind. He's had his type before, and not once did they make it. Because of the long trip, each pair needs to wake for at least three shifts, now four with their delay. He overloads his own tasks in the now more than likely case he can't rely on him later. He'll need to study the bio lab's footage and hope he can learn how to keep their germs alive until the next biologist wakes. What a fucking mess.

-

The console reads seventy-three years, two months. Levi grinds his teeth as he runs another round of estimates. Everything is as it was before. This shouldn't be happening. He runs it again. Again. Again.

Seventy-three years, three months.

Their trajectory is unchanged. No vector irregularities. No power fluctuations. Levi moves into the engine room. His eye passes over every inch of the machine. His hands tighten every bolt, oil every joint and replace every battery. He returns to the console and shuts it down entirely, replaces every bit of hardware that can be replaced, and reboots it to its factory state while enabling only essential operations. Their date shifts before his eyes. 

Eighty-five.

Two hundred and thirty seven.

Five hundred and eighty-four.

NO DATA. 

Levi's heart jackhammers in his ears. He's checked everything. Replaced and cleaned and oiled everything. No other systems are affected. They are running at full speed, and then some. Movement catches his eye. He turns. 

The walls are lush with blue foliage. Green pools lie ankle-deep as if weighed down by a gravity of their own. Iridescent pollen blooms and spills out of blindingly vibrant flowers until he can barely see his own hands in front of him. Mounds of coiling foliage rise from the floor and shaped too much like a human body. 

"Levi?"

Levi looks behind him. Erwin watches him cautiously. "Are you alright?"

"Check the germs. Now," Levi says, and if Erwin's face is a fraction as haunted as Levi's must be, that must be why he obeys without question. He finds Levi in the two-person barracks drinking what feels like his body weight in water.

"How did you know?"

"What was it?"

"The localized gravity generator," Erwin says. "It was adapted to their planet's, but our readings were a mite off. The liquid they live in-"

"Began to sink. Compress."

Erwin stares at him. "Yes. How-"

"Just a hunch." Levi smiles without humor. "Seniority perk."

The flowers and the pollen and the pools are gone. Levi returns to the console. Forty-eight.

-

Levi is sure it had been a terse marriage - maybe he was hoping to escape after all, and didn't know it. Didn't want to acknowledge it. Yet Erwin speaks of him without a drop of resentment, without anything but love and respect and awe.  

Levi can't understand it. Hates that he can't understand it. He found someone he could have spent the rest of his life with, and didn't.

"Isn't that what you did?" Erwin asks. "What you do every time you fly?"

"No one misses me."

"Friends, neighbors, colleagues? Family?"

"No. I made sure of it."

-

They aren't usually so vibrant. He can usually tell when it starts. He isn't usually so distracted.

Levi rebuffs Erwin's attempts at friendly games or movie nights, as if Levi is a friend and not a blip in his life to come and go and never come back. He shouldn't have started them, shouldn't have grown complacent. It's been a few hundred years since he'd been paired with someone so obnoxiously persistent. 

Levi sinks his free hours in the STIM. It was designed to flood one's senses. To keep him so occupied that he can stop thinking, stop seeing and hearing things. He emerges only to work and sleep. 

Erwin teases him when he catches him coming or going, rattling off wive's tales about digital ghosts or burning eyes. He doesn't hide the perplexed hurt in his eyes. It was none of Levi's business. If he wanted a friend, he should have paid more attention to his acclimation course and given his post to someone else. He has his interstellar germs for comfort. He has the second stimulation chamber. Levi is under no obligation to humor him. 

-

When Levi wakes, Erwin is still asleep. He shivers. His suit whirs with the effort of whisking away cold sweat and adjusting the internal temperature against, by the look of his flushed face, a high fever. Levi tries to turn him over. Erwin shrugs him off and turns away. His eyes are red-rimmed, unseeing. 

Levi maneuvers himself to the medical wing to grab a kit. Erwin waves hello from the adjoining kitchen. Levi stares. He couldn't have beaten him here. His eyes are still annoyingly sad, but they are bright. His face is not flushed. Erwin grabs his ration and secures it in the defrosting chamber. Impatient, he excuses himself to check on the microbes. Levi stays in the kitchen until the meal is prepared and extracted automatically from the chamber. There it sits forgotten in open, unsterile air. 

Levi enters the bio lab and drags Erwin back into the kitchen with the usual lecture about eating on schedule. When he passes by the barracks, they are empty.

-

Erwin makes some more noise about being worried for Levi staying so long in the STIM. Levi's glares can shut up anyone, but Erwin has either forgotten that Levi has the authority to make him clean the ship from one end to the other with a toothpick, or doesn't care. 

-

Levi shaves another few years off their date. But forty-six isn't thirty. 

He spends a few days poring over conference footage and aerospace engineering journals for anything he's missed. Engines change faster than he can learn them. He is only lucky that they fall to the same old enemies. Overheating. Wrong or missing parts. Overzealous engineers.

Unable to resist it any longer, he pushes it again. Forty-three.  Again. Thirty-seven. Again. Thirty-

His hands disappear. Countless scorched titanium rods shift and whine in their place. More titanium meets him as he looks for his other arm, and as he looks down at himself. They don't usually come so promptly. His nose might have flared in annoyance at being robbed of a perfectly boring flight, would that he had one. 

Levi moves back to the engine room using muscle memory and tries to stem the adrenaline that is both nonexistent and yet charges his beating not-heart until his limbs rattle in the quiet of the black debris-field. He has no eyes to see it and yet knows it is there. He bumps against and maneuvers around melted plating and islands of cooling plasma. He starves with no stomach. His head pounds with no brain. He entertains himself in the senseless black with no mind, casts little plays as himself and as every character he's ever seen and every person he's every known and then once again, and still he finds time with his incinerated brain and snuffed mind to miserably, desperately miss Erwin. 

He knows he must have flapped blindly around the engine undoing his modifications for weeks, but when flesh wraps around titanium and his metal sockets fill with his borrowed eyes, he hovers limply to the console and finds that not three hours have passed. Forty-six isn't thirty. Forty-six isn't never.

Levi passes through the halls and knocks into every stray instrument and protruding plate. The lamps are too bright. The hum and rumble of the ship is atrociously loud. Erwin has heard his uncharacteristically clumsy movements and saves Levi the trek of trying to remember where the bio lab is by finding him first. Erwin is too loud, too bright. He shrinks when Levi grabs at the front of his suit as if expecting a reprimand, expecting anything but Levi's trembling arms around him, Levi's not-disintegrated face against his real, solid chest, his heart too loud in Levi's ears.

-

Levi re-acclimates quickly, as he always does. Erwin doesn't. Erwin is curious. Erwin has a right, after that, to be curious. He follows Levi to the STIM pod after he'd taken him to the barracks for a furiously long nap.

"Levi-"

"So we both did something unprofessional," he cuts him off. "We're even." Levi hits the command to close the pod doors. Erwin holds them open.

"Levi, a hug isn't unprofessional. You looked horrible. Horrified."

"Then let me recalibrate."  

"You're not a machine."

Levi sits up. "What makes a machine?"

Erwin sighs, realizing too late that he wasn't winning this one.

"A collection of parts performing a defined task," Levi answers for him. He would've clanged his indestructible bones together if he could.

"A machine doesn't dream."

"Neither do I."

"I know you do."

"Didn't see clairvoyance in your resume."

"You dream of calm and stability. You're married to that engine because it's the only thing you can control. Everything, everyone, else, time itself, you think you can ignore."

Levi sits back. "Let go of the fucking door."

-

The poor fuck should really have gotten a warning as to how vindictive a grudge Levi is willing to carry. He pulls up the most heinously violent programs he knows and goes through an army of nameless, faceless goons in every other era in human history before he slams the doors open and takes his sleep in the medical bay. He spends the next week in STIM when he isn't exercising, and avoids any more surprises. One week left before this shift ends.

One week before the shift ends, STIM breaks down. 

Levi bangs around it looking for the culprit, but this is newer tech, and there's a limit to how much he can learn in his waking hours when technology lurches forward in his icy sleep. The software is even more inscrutable. It uses operating systems entirely divorced from those used in the ship's computer, entirely newer, experimental. There are manuals and training videos on board, but he already spends most of his downtime studying their engine and wouldn't stomach much more. There are engineers from this era on board who might figure it out in minutes. It wasn't worth it, he tells his gritting teeth, his white-knuckled grip on the doors as he pulls them shut. 

He'll need to stifle the trails the old fashioned way. He's only had the STIM for two flights. He isn't helpless. 

Levi forces himself to return to the control room for his work shift. He was gone for weeks, he is sure of it. He was here and there and nowhere. There was nothing. There was no one. The hums and clangs of the ship weren't enough when he returned. He keeps an earpiece in one ear blasting who-cares-what as long as it's loud and obnoxious and real. He runs and lifts and pedals.

-

There is an accident in the gas and fluid recycling plant. They need to switch on the ArtiGrav to contain it. 

Levi feigns some business in the med bay and lets Erwin take care of it.  He doesn't make it. He was sure he would make it to the bed, make some noise about a headache and get back up when Erwin switched it back on. He doesn't even try to crawl, or to move into a more dignified position. Simply breathing is an effort. 

Erwin limps back and says something self-deprecating about exercise or weight before falling harshly to his knees to check Levi's vitals. With a great grunt - he hasn't acclimated to the gravity either - he moves Levi to the closest bed in the med bay. Idiot. Just switch off the ArtiGrav. 

Erwin gets the idea eventually. Once its back on, he finds Levi in the gym, strapped in and running at the highest setting, the steepest slope. 

"You should have told me. I didn't know you had no muscle enhancers," Erwin says.

Levi runs. They were too late for him. He, born too early. They only function prior to space flight. Prior to near-total muscle atrophy. 

"I hear implants are coming along. Exoskeletons that let you wipe your ass," Levi says. "Another flight or two, maybe I can see Earth again."

Erwin's brows knit. He's putting it together. The Company launches flights from Mars' orbit. 

"Would you?"

Levi runs.

"Would you see it with me?" 

Levi runs.

-

Erwin finds him at the portside windows a few hours before their shift ends.

"Can't seem to find spare batteries for the ion coolant. Have you..."

Levi shifts against the glass and waves him over.  

"So maybe I'm kind of an ass," Levi says.

Erwin holds onto a nearby strap to dampen his momentum. "All things considered-"

"Fuck things. You're a good kid and-."

"Kid? Levi, how old are you?"

"Eight hu-"

"Your waking age."

Levi frowns. "You calling me a cheat?"

"You are." 

"You try living through-"

"You visited those times like a tourist. They were layovers to you. You don't live anywhere."

"I live here."

"You work here."

It's black outside. It's always black.

"Maybe you were right about the engine," Levi says. "I gotta play catch up soon as we come back but there's only so far you can improve on a thing like that. Only so fast you can go. Nothing else makes sense. You don't make sense."

Erwin huffs. "There's nothing to me."

Levi turns to him fully. "Why did you leave him?"

Erwin breathes out as if struck. "He knew what I wanted. I knew what he wanted. We were a part of each other's lives, but never the whole."

Levi isn't convinced, and looks it. 

"We weren't separated at the beginning of the world or cast from the same mould or the same flame," Erwin goes on, "We were just two people who-" Erwin blinks away silent tears. Levi catches them in his palm before they drift away.

"-whose orbits converged. And then separated."

He's using the past tense. He's accepted it.

"You can still make it."

"He was forty-five when we left." 

Levi grimaces. "I can't make it go any faster-"

"I didn't say-"

"I tried, alright?" His voice rises. He doesn't dare look down at his hands. "I tried, and we all- we all- I-"

"I know-" Erwin takes his shuddering hands in his own.

"The other lead navigators could shave off a few more years," Levi says. "If they can just-"

Erwin's hands are on his shoulders. They're on his face. "I know, I know. You did everything you could." 

Levi looks down, and his hands, though gloved, are made of flesh. Flesh, plastic, and titanium. He wraps one around Erwin's wrist, but doesn't push him away. The other anchors them both. 

"I left someone, too," Levi admits. "Real bastard, but only family I had. Only one he had. I think I shouldn't have."

"It's done," Erwin says. "If it was a mistake, then learn from it."

Levi's hands have stopped shaking. 

"Stay with me a while when we land. I want to show you around. Or," Erwin amends, "we'll be showing one another around. I won't have seen the place in near-fifty years either."

Levi leans into his touch. "I don’t stick around."

"Just for a while," he says into his ear, like it's a secret. "Just this once."

Erwin blocks out the glass, the black, the stars. His hands are too soft in his hair. 

Erwin finds him at the portside windows.

"Can't seem to find spare batteries for the ion c-"  

"Port supply cabin, on your left," Levi says, and there are no hands in his hair.

-

Erwin preps the organisms as Levi initiates their cryochambers. The microbes have been successfully acclimated to their environment and, absent total power failure, will be able to survive without constant monitoring. Even so, Erwin installs sensors rigged to wake him should their vitals flicker. 

Erwin asks Levi to wait for him on Mars. They sink into sleep together. Erwin has another scheduled shift with a junior engineer, and a last one with a fellow astrobiologist. Levi has one more with a senior navigator. Together, they shorten their time to forty-two. 

In forty-two years, they disembark. Levi is gone before Erwin wakes. Levi stops by corporate after his post-flight physical and signs up for the next flight out. Two weeks. He overrides the protocol that demands they re-acclimate on earth for three months by way of citing some nonsense statutes to an impressionable young personnel officer. He'll be put on a wellness watch for this for sure when he comes back, but he's squeezed out of them before. They need him. They don't know why there are exponentially fewer accidents on his flights, and only his flights. They care for his wellness only as far as it concerns the Company, and that's enough for him. He does good work. He'll do good work for the next thousand years.

One day before departure. He lingered, as he always does, in orbit. It's peacetime now, but a terse one. After the initial exhilaration of the golden age of space exploration, borders are being drawn again. There are rebellions and factions and strongmen, just as there once were and always will be. Bloated pockets up top and pennies for the rest. He's seen it all before.  If he cared to gamble, he'd bet it starts with the Venusian stations this time. Shit work, shit pay, shit weather. 

He stops by a reintegration center with timelines and graphs on walls and pamphlets and screens that chart all that he's missed. He scrolls through a list of cured diseases, and a list of those newly discovered. Trials pending for musculoskeletal implants. They have been in this category for sixty years.

Erwin is on a broadcast answering questions about the planemo microbes. He calls them germs once, with a small smile.

Levi boards the ship and enters his cryopod. They're chasing nebulas this time. His vision begins to dim. His limbs relax and sink into the synthetic padding. He sinks back into immortality. 


End file.
